Bartimaeus

It's about a difference of $30 here in the U.S., but Malcador's in Canada, so I don't know.

Hey, I provided three different explanations...one of which didn't apply (you know I checked out the English, we talked about it), but that still leaves me possibly just forgetting about it. But I didn't, I just didn't enjoy K-On enough to mention it - had to be a 6/10 or better show, and K-On was a "solid" 5/10, . K-On's English voice direction was pretty bad. Literally has the Sailor Moon VA as the main character, but somehow the direction is off and everyone sounds wrong. At least the Japanese was mostly fine. Sawako, go directly into the dumpster, do not pass go. Just seven more seasons of that, and you'll finally be free, .

Of the shows that I have watched and enjoyed(-ish), I really like the Sailor Moon, Ranma, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Revolutionary Girl Utena English dubs; The Vision of Escaflowne's is fine as well. In contrast, I'd say that the English dubs for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Paranoia Agent, Samurai Champloo, Cardcaptor Sakura, Princess Tutu, and Girls' Last Tour were all between poor and terrible. If I'm forgetting anything in this list, it's either because I forgot them, didn't notice they had an English option, or because I didn't really enjoy the show in question, . The few modern shows I've watched and have checked the English dubs out for have had pretty terrible English dubs - Girls' Last Tour and Madoka, for example. Unlike 90s and earlier stuff, that doesn't seem to be the fault of casting or production values but instead just deliberately atrocious direction. I don't know why they do that, but you can usually tell pretty fast when a bunch of VAs are putting on what are clearly "false" voices that make them sound unnaturally anime-esque.

It kind of looks like they lifted Broken Age's art style.

I don't really care what language something's if it's good. Madoka Magica's and Steins;Gate's Japanese dubs both made me want to fill my earholes in with cement, while I am a big supporter of NGE's original English dub; contrarily, watching Cardcaptor Sakura in English would merit your execution, and Sailor Moon is good in either. All about direction and how well it's pulled off. In specifically Princess Mononoke's case, I actually like the direction of it for the most part (lot of really good voice cast choices...besides Jada Pinkett Smith), but the writing in that film comes across as sounding so dumb that it's still difficult to listen to in my own tongue at times. If characters weren't constantly saying stupid stuff all the time, it'd probably be fine.

Princess Mononoke (1997), but in Japanese this time. Hearing stuff like "I was prepared the moment I let my arrow fly" or "it's your fate so you can see with eyes unclouded by hate" sounds way more dumb when you hear it out loud in comparison to when you just read it, so I thoroughly endorse the Japanese version over the English. Having to listen to Jada Pinkett Smith play as an angry Japanese lady was an especially atrocious casting decision by Disney even back when I watched this film the first time. Still not my favorite Ghibli film (in fact, I still can't say that I really particularly like it), but at least it was better.

I guess that's what I don't like about this season. The first one kept the viewer in the loop on what the main characters were learning as the show went along, whereas in this one I only have a much vaguer grasp on what's happening with everyone because they've decided that the secret of the big mystery plot is more important than the character writing. Also, I just realized I called Claudia "Sandra", whoops. Same thing, .

Dark, season 2, episode 6: somebody who's already watched the show please make this make sense to me.

This brings back to mind a film I've mentioned a few times over the years, Jeanne Dielman (1975), which based on your description of and subsequent reaction to Memoria, I don't think I could recommend to you. Jeanne Dielman is a 3 hour and 22 minute Belgian-French film about a lady that speaks to no-one and does chores. I thought it was neat and interesting, but also that it would be the most painfully long and boring film in the entire history of cinema for the vast majority of movie-watchers. Just imagine: a minute longer than the theatrical version of The Return of the King (and really, more than that because of how much time is taken up by the credits of TRotK!), but almost literally nothing of note happens the entire length of the film. So I'm going to watch Memoria to see how it compares to that. Right, the first 45 seconds of the film (I actually checked) are taken up by this frame: A bit indulgent already for my tastes. The next three and a half minutes are Tilda Swanson comically shambling out of bed. Somehow, this already feels much worse right off the bat than Jeanne Dielman did to me. ...Alright, I'm twenty minutes in, and I think I have to call it quits. This is deathly boring. I don't know what Jeanne Dielman did exactly that made it feel a little different and more interesting than this, but this just isn't working for me. Maybe it's because I felt some sort of human connection to the character in Jeanne Dielman and I very much don't to Tilda Swanson here.

can we replace "" with this instead

My cat acts like she's received a mortal wound and is on the verge of expiring when you put a sock on her back. I imagine her brain would immediately cease all function if I ever put a collar on her.

I hated it the first time I listened to it, but I liked it by the time I got to the end of the show. The power using something appropriately for something you like, I guess.

What I recognized: SpyxFamily (because of InsaneCommander's posts in this thread) My Hero Academia (I think) because a specific character I read about (before having ever seen the show) sold me on trying it out and then it was the worst show I'd ever seen in my entire life (but I say that a lot, so). Neon Genesis Evangelion One Punch Man Dragon Ball Z Somehow, I didn't notice Madoka Magica (e: or JoJo? How did I miss that too? ) which majestic says was in it. I suppose that's just as well, really.

Dark, up to episode 4 of season 2. I feel like this season isn't working quite as well as the previous. We went from season 1 which was primarily about characters whose motivations and goals we mostly understood even if the viewer didn't always necessarily agree with how they went about it (generally relationship issues, looking for loved ones, and trying to glean what little they can of what happened while dealing with their lives) to instead focusing on more mercurial and nebulous characters where it is not quite so clear and I'm pretty frequently asking myself questions such as "what exactly is this person trying to accomplish by doing this", "how do they know this information", and "why are they hiding or not doing anything with what they do know". Not only that, but the show feels a lot more hyper-focused on the "big story" stuff, which is not my preference; I value understanding my characters more than understanding the story. Still four episodes left to change my mind, but so far, it's definitely not as enjoyable to me as the first. Though it's not "I wouldn't want to watch the third season" bad...yet, .

Dark, season 1. Not entirely sure what happened at the end there, but it sure was provocative.

Didn't a current Ravens linebacker just OD and pass away as well?

I got roped into watching the first couple episodes of Dark. It basically seems like German Stranger Things so far. By "German Stranger Things", I mean that instead of there being any silly fun, it's just slow, dark, and austere all the time...and instead of inter-dimensional monsters eating people, it's time travel experiments getting kids killed - in other words, German Stranger Things. It's not bad, though.

If it's the actual 2D drawn stuff, it's most likely just the result of the entire process being digital. There are actually people (and sometimes studios*!) out there who try to take the wonderfully soft and noisy traditional animation of older movies and shows and blast it with various filters until it looks "digital". Generally, it's a matter of blurring everything, removing and evening out noise, and then super sharpening lines/edges, all to result in what I call a very plastic looking effect. It's hideous to me. Probably last month, I was doing a source comparison for 1995 film Ghost in the Shell, and for HD sources, there is effectively one scan used by the blurays (although that scan has been tinkered with a few times between the different bluray releases over the years) and also a very distinct scan that was instead used for a rare TV broadcast. The TV broadcast, bizarrely, pretty much blows the bluray scan out of the water in terms of clarity, level of detail, and film grain (and also has a larger matte** to boot)...but the person who made the recording lost the original file (with only some screenshots still remaining of it) while re-encoding it after having plasticized it through filters so that it looks atrocious. Just a terrible human being on the whole really, . *Terminator 2, which isn't even animation, got destroyed in a recent 4K bluray release because of whatever studio was responsible for handling it deciding they didn't like noise and filtering it to high hell - the original 1080p bluray consequently looks more detailed and less gross. **That is, more of the frame is visible and not cut-off arbitrarily like in the bluray release. See, for a very clear-cut example, Watership Down in its original bluray release vs. the recent Criterion "remaster". Screw you and whatever the original aspect ratio was (if that's even the case), give me the complete frame if they actually drew it and there aren't any obvious problems with it.

I typed into Google "wil wheaton no beard" and looked for about 30 seconds, truly I am losing my touch anyways, his face actually does look more normal with the beard I think, but at the same time some cleaning up and trimming would help it not look so neckbeardy

RLM only gave it literally about a thirty second review because of how much they didn't care. Probably could've saved yourself some time, . It's a little confusing that there are two Pinocchio films literally called "Pinocchio" coming out in 2022 - this del Toro stop-motion one (December) and also the Walt Disney live action one (September). Well, I know which one is bound to at least be a lot more interesting...

He suffers from a pretty unfortunate case of the neck beard on top of the uncomfortable over-grinning stuff. This is apparently the only photo on the internet of him as an adult(-ish?) without the beard:

It's perfectly fine to like this sort of thing, truly and honestly. I am by no means the ultimate arbitrator of what is and isn't O.K. to do in film, animated or otherwise. There's plenty of proof of that in this thread alone, where most everyone else here cannot even begin to understand what it is exactly that catches my eye and delights me in the various things that I've enjoyed that does absolutely nothing for the rest of you, while what individually appeals to and excites everyone else equally does nothing for me. It's pretty much exactly what I was talking about two pages ago when I said there is something inherently offensive to me in films like this and A Silent Voice. Their style and sensibilities in how they attempt to present characters, dialogue, and tone, how they try to convey ideas and plot is so quickly and so intensely wrong to me that I don't think we are reconcilable. It's setting something off in my brain that causes the same sort of extreme resentment for @majestic that makes it impossible for him to enjoy any aspect of nu-Star Trek, even the parts that are actually similar to the old Star Trek shows that he does enjoy...but the thing is, I also have a way lower tolerance for what I hate than majestic does, and so I can't keep watching something that violates my sense of how things should be done to its very core like he is able to. The most I can do is take a few minutes of it at a time if it's between other stuff that I do actually like. It seems like a very remote chance that if I were to watch another half hour that it's all going to start to click, or that I'm going to suddenly like the style and characters of the film when I so strongly did not for the first twenty minutes.

Wolf Children (2012). @Sarex, look away - I could not even finish it. It's so extreme that I couldn't even get out of the prologue. I am now going to go on a completely insane and unhinged rant about anime drama films and why they almost never seem to work for me. Please do not take it personally, or better yet, don't even read it in the first place.

Himitsu no Akko-chan aka The Secrets of Akko-chan, a post almost certainly only of interest to @majestic: Wikipedia seems to suggest that this is the very first shoujo manga(?), originally published in 1962...but not the first shoujo anime, as it came out in 1969 after a few others had already premiered. The premise is pretty simple: Akko is a young girl obsessed with mirrors, but accidentally breaks her favorite one. After giving it a proper burial, the goddess of mirrors descends from the heavens to give Akko a magical compact that allows her to transform into any creature or person when she looks into it. There were three different series of it made, but only a tiny bit of this franchise is available with English subtitles - the first episode of the 1969 show, the first episode of the 1998 show, and two short "films" (~25 minutes each) of the 1988 show, and I watched them all.

I found him pretty amusing for the first ~10 or so episodes because it seemed like just about literally every time he ever tried to do anything, everyone else would just summarily dump on him. But I definitely can agree that it's not the best, .